Terms of Use

Last updated 7 September 2026

These terms are the agreement between you and the independent developer who operates Surfbird. Using the app means accepting them. They are written to be read, not to be impenetrable.

What Surfbird is

Surfbird listens to a conversation through your phone's microphone, turns it into text on the device, and suggests things to say. The suggestions are produced by a large language model. They are sometimes wrong, sometimes obvious, and sometimes badly judged for the moment.

You are responsible for what you say. Surfbird is a suggestion, not advice. It is not legal, financial, medical, employment or professional advice of any kind, and nothing it produces should be relied on as fact. Check anything that matters before repeating it.

This is the most important clause here, so it is not buried.

Surfbird transcribes what the other person says. In many places — including a number of US states and most of the EU — transcribing or recording a conversation requires the consent of everyone in it. Some employers, exam boards and hiring processes forbid outside assistance regardless of the law.

  • Obtaining any consent required is entirely your responsibility. Surfbird does not ask for it, does not announce itself, and cannot know where you or the other party are.
  • You must not use Surfbird where doing so would break the law that applies to you or to the other party.
  • You must not use Surfbird where the rules of the conversation forbid it — an examination, an assessment, or a process you have agreed not to take outside help in.
  • You are responsible for anything you upload, including that you are entitled to share it.

If you are unsure whether a call is one you may transcribe, the answer is to ask the other person or not to run it.

Your account

You need an account, created through Sign in with Apple. You must be at least 16. Keep access to your Apple ID secure; anyone who has it has your Surfbird history. Tell us at support@surfbird.app if you think someone else is using your account.

Acceptable use

Do not use Surfbird to break the law, to harass or deceive anyone, to impersonate someone, to gain an advantage in a process that forbids it, or in any way that puts the other person at risk. Do not attempt to extract credentials from the app, resell access, or automate it against our servers. We may end your access if you do.

Plans and payment

  • Your first thirty minutes of coaching are free. No card is required.
  • Paid plans are monthly subscriptions bought through Apple. Apple takes the payment, holds your billing details, and is who you cancel with — in Settings on your device, at least 24 hours before the renewal date. We never see your card.
  • Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel.
  • Refunds are handled by Apple under its own policy, not by us.
  • Plans are measured in hours of coaching, not calls. Capped includes ten hours a month; Unlimited has a fair-use ceiling of a hundred hours — five hours every working day. A single call is limited to sixty minutes, whichever plan you are on. The ceilings exist so a shared login or a runaway client cannot generate an unlimited bill, and no ordinary use will reach them.
  • Prices may change. If they do, you are told before it affects a renewal, and Apple asks you to agree.

Your content

Your transcripts, recaps, notes and documents are yours. You give us permission to store and process them only to run the service for you — writing tips, writing recaps, and showing you your own history. We do not use them to train models, sell them, or show them to anyone else. The app, its design and its name remain ours.

Availability

Surfbird depends on Apple's speech recognition, on Anthropic's API and on hosting we do not own. It will sometimes be slow, sometimes wrong and sometimes unavailable. It is offered as it is, with no guarantee that it will be available, accurate or fit for any particular conversation.

Liability

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for what happens on your calls — a deal lost, a job not offered, a thing said that should not have been, or any indirect or consequential loss. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to what you paid in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here excludes liability for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Ending this

You can stop at any time: cancel the subscription with Apple and email support@surfbird.app to have your account and everything in it deleted. We may suspend or end access if these terms are broken, or if we stop running the service — in which case you get reasonable notice and a chance to export your recaps.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and of the state in which the operator resides, without regard to conflict of law rules. If you are a consumer in the EU or UK, this does not deprive you of the protections of your own country's mandatory consumer law.

Changes

If these terms change materially, the date at the top changes and anyone with an account is told by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use Surfbird after that means accepting the new version.

Contact

support@surfbird.app. It is one person, so give it a day.